The 2013 NSF ATE PI Conference, in Pictures

​What an amazing time! I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the 2013 ATE Principal Investigators Conference and I’m grateful to be able to share the experience here! There’s just so much to share, I thought it best to do a time line in pictures:

We arrived in Washington D.C. at noon on a Wednesday and hustled over to the Omni Shoreham hotel where the conference was being held:

Seriously, I think I’m gonna like it here.

Hustle is the right word, because I was trying to catch the 1 P.M. workshop “Advancing Innovation and Disseminating Impact: How to Spread the Word.” Why the hustle? Because that’s where my bloggin’ buddies were speaking!

I have to say how impressed I was listening to Jennifer tell her story. That lady saw where she wanted to be (in terms of her education and career) and went there. She is a go-getter if I ever saw one!

And it was amazing to get to share with Sandra how the blogging opportunity has opened doors for me. It really does serve as an on-line portfolio, where potential employers can see the benefits of the hands-on instruction I’ve received at Madison College.

(Side note- I have a personal rule while writing about only using the same word, except for lab lingo, no more than three times in the same piece to limit redundancy. Well, today that rule is just going out the window in regards to the words grateful, opportunity, and amazing. I’m sorry, but there’s just no way around it while describing this experience! And exclamation marks, too. There will be lots of exclamation marks!)

So after the workshop, I finally had a chance to actually go check into my room:

In twenty years, this is the first bed I’ve slept in that did not have a child in it, kicking me in the back. I slept like a rock.

Then at 6 P.M., it was off to the opening plenary session where we heard Rick Stephens, the retired Vice President of Human Resources and Administration of Boeing Corporation and the Honorable David E. Price, U.S. House of Representatives, speak about the importance of community colleges in STEM education.

And then supper:

Really, I’m just moving in. Tell my kids I’ll miss them.

The next morning, Thursday, we were invited to the ATE Student/Alumni Recognition breakfast, where I and forty-nine other students were feeling pretty fancy after getting presented with these:

You like me! You really like me!

And then Katie (our awesome alumni who presented on our Stem Cells program in the showcase with me) and I went to set up for our showcase:

Is it just me, or does this look familiar?

Next, holy cow, Jennifer and I got to tour the J. Craig Venter Institute, and saw the equipment that was used in Dr. Venter’s being the first (along with his team) to sequence the DNA of a free-living organism, Haemophilus influenzae in 1995.

Friday, the last day of the conference, I participate in a breakfast roundtable where we got to share our stories as community college students: